


Make Your Move

by lyonet



Series: A Right Turn After Bad Idea [10]
Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Anal Sex, Blindfolds, F/F, F/M, Fluff and Smut, Light Angst, M/M, Past minor character death, Wedding Planning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-27
Updated: 2016-08-27
Packaged: 2018-08-11 07:25:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7882078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyonet/pseuds/lyonet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You’re trying to study, move house and get married all at the same time?” Will whistled. “You’re a sucker for punishment, mate.”</p>
<p>“There’s a list,” Merlin told him. It was becoming a mantra. Trust in the list. Believe in the list.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Make Your Move

“So when’s the wedding?” Morgana wanted to know, over dinner.

Merlin had been thinking about his proposal for weeks – months if he was honest, half-formed fantasies kept tucked for future reference at the back of his mind. He’d taken a leaf out of Arthur’s book to crowd-source ideas among their friends (after all, half of them had dated Arthur at one point or another and were happy to offer tips from personal experience, a situation that should probably have felt weirder than it actually did) but had not risked planning anything beyond the proposal itself. Having been engaged for around an hour now, he was still riding the high of Arthur’s ‘yes’. As far as the wedding itself went, he’d got as far as pulling Gwen aside on the walk over to the restaurant to ask if she’d make the rings. He was pretty sure Morgana’s question wasn’t serious but Arthur leaned forward immediately and said, “Soon. Before the end of the year, preferably.”

Vivian dropped her spoon. Morgana laughed, like Arthur had delivered quite a good punchline. When she realised he meant it, she exchanged an incredulous look with Vivian and said, “Arthur, you do _know_ it’s November?”

“Early November,” Arthur said, unperturbed.

“That is _not_ how weddings work,” Vivian said, looking almost outraged. “Morgana and I were lucky to get ours done in under a year. It’s practically a full-time job. It _is_ a full-time job. We would have murdered each other a week after the engagement party without our wedding planner.”

“Oh, engagement party,” Arthur said cheerfully. “We should have one of those.”

Morgana put her face in her hands and shook her head. Merlin laughed and so did Gwen. “You don’t need to worry about that right now,” she said peaceably. “You can work out everything from Facebook status onward once we’ve had dinner. How about cake?”

Everyone wanted cake, so peace reigned. Instead of eating his celebratory tiramisu, however, Arthur started scrawling wedding plans on a napkin. Merlin rolled his eyes, offering him a forkful at mouth level and leaning sideways to look at the preliminary notes. It looked like Arthur wanted a wedding party of six, with two witnesses each. He had also jotted down a list of people who would want to give speeches, a few possible venues, and was toying with a red and gold colour scheme.

“Lance,” Arthur said, looking up, “will you be my best man?”

Lance beamed. “It’s an honour, Arthur.”

Merlin whisked the napkin out from under Arthur’s pen before anything else could go down in writing. “I want Freya and Will to be my witnesses,” he said, adding them under Lance’s name. When dealing with Arthur, he had learned that things were not decided until they were on a list. “Best – people, I suppose?”

“Must you have Will?” Arthur sighed.

Merlin smiled brightly. “But imagine how well he’ll get along with your father!”

“Speaking of whom,” Arthur said, standing up and taking out his phone, “I’d better give him a call. My father, that is, you can deal with Will yourself.”

“I can talk to him too, if you want,” Merlin offered, suddenly worried. He was not sure who Uther had had in mind for Arthur to marry someday – if he could have betrothed him from birth to ensure a suitable match, he probably would have done – but whatever he’d had in mind, Merlin was not it, and he’d made his disapproval known at every opportunity.

Arthur just shook his head, kissed Merlin’s cheek and went outside to make the call. If you took Uther’s general…Uther-ness out of the equation, sharing important life news with parents was a good idea, so Merlin called his mother. Hunith was delighted, though not very surprised. She wanted to hear all about the proposal; Morgana stole the phone out of Merlin’s hand and put it on speaker so that they could all chip in, and they’d only just hung up when Arthur came back inside, his smile a bit too tight around the edges. Morgana looked at him with narrowed eyes.

“Ignore him,” she said.

“You don’t know what he said,” Arthur pointed out, reclaiming his chair.

“I don’t need to, I can guess. He said most of it to me. Ignore him,” Morgana repeated, forcefully.

Arthur tapped his cake fork against hers, smiling a little easier, and took Merlin’s hand under the table.

It was quite late by the time they left the restaurant, and very cold. There was a quick flurry of hugs before they all went off in different directions. Arthur slid on the elegant leather gloves that always gave Merlin dirty thoughts and they walked over to where the Porsche was parked.

“Did I spring that on you?” Arthur asked, a bit uncertainly. “About getting married before the end of the year, that is. We don’t have to if you think it’s too much to take on. After all, I definitely want us to be in our new place before we get married. It’s like setting up dominoes while you’re still building the table, isn’t it? It’s just, well.” He smiled, the one Merlin always thought of as his sunshine smile. “I really want to marry you.”

Merlin could feel his face lighting up with an answering smile, so wide it hurt. “Me too.”

Inside the car was blissfully warm. Merlin went boneless against the plush upholstery, a bit overwhelmed by just how good his life was right now. Arthur had only had one glass of champagne at the gallery, so as to drive later, but Merlin had had two and most of Arthur's cake as well, and he was feeling pleasantly drowsy. He mostly just listened while Arthur brainstormed wedding ideas.

“I have a few houses for us to look at. Maybe we can take a couple of days off work, get as much done as we can all at once, what do you think?” Arthur drummed thoughtfully on the steering wheel. “Hey, if we get the timing just right, we could even do a combined engagement-housewarming party.”

Merlin blinked at him. All of a sudden he was beginning to see what Morgana had meant.

“All right, enough,” he said firmly. “No more planning tonight. We just got _engaged,_ let’s celebrate the traditional way. Without spreadsheets.”

Arthur smirked. “Sex? That involves sheets. And spreading.”

“That is the worst joke _ever_ , why do I want to marry you again?”

“I spend too much time with accountants,” Arthur conceded. “Pellinore and Forridel have a filthy sense of humour. Oh, I need to put them down on the list – ”

Merlin plucked the napkin from his jacket pocket. “Don’t even think about it.”

It was a short drive but Merlin waited to tackle Arthur until they were in the bedroom, when Arthur was about to take off his gloves. “No, leave them on,” he said, moving into Arthur’s space and pressing soft, speculative kisses against his neck. “Do you mind if I lead tonight?”

He knew Arthur preferred to be in control during sex, but got a nod and a grin in answer and rewarded the quick agreement with a deep, pleased kiss. For a while he focused on mapping out his – not boyfriend any more, his _fiance –_ with both hands, stroking through the soft blond hair and across the broad shoulders, appreciating the firm, familiar lines of his body. Arthur had dressed formally for the gallery opening in a dark tailored three-piece, and Merlin thoroughly enjoyed the slow process of removing it. Arthur should wear a waistcoat more often.

When he’d stripped him down to an unbuttoned shirt, open trousers and those leather gloves, Merlin guided him into the armchair under the window and straddled him on it. Merlin was still mostly dressed; when Arthur made a frustrated noise at the layers of fabric between his hands and the hips underneath them, Merlin put on a bit of a show as he took his own suit off. He didn’t climb straight back onto Arthur’s lap afterwards, going to collect lube from the bedside drawer and – on a whim, aware of Arthur’s eyes hot on his bare skin – plucking the discarded red tie off the bed-post as he returned. Arthur pulled him down, mouthing lush demands into the hollow of his throat and the joint of his neck that would show up blue in the morning.

“You’re sure you want me to keep the gloves on?” he asked, running his leather-clad fingers along Merlin’s arms. He left a trail of goosebumps in his path.

“Very sure.” Merlin slicked his fingers and reached behind himself, sighing as he took them in. Though he was the one who had set their pace, he was beginning to get impatient and overdid the lube to make the prep faster. He sank down on Arthur’s cock with a groan that Arthur echoed, giving himself a couple of minutes to adjust before passing over the tie. “Blindfold me.”

Arthur gave a breathless laugh. “You’re bringing out all the kinks tonight.” He looped the tie around Merlin’s eyes, tying it carefully. “Is that all right?”

Merlin turned his head from side to side to see whether the blindfold would slip. It didn’t. “That’s good,” he said, sliding his hands up Arthur’s chest to his shoulders and rolling his hips slowly. “Oh. _Yes_. That’s so good.”

It was all about what he could feel now: warm skin, the puff of uneven breaths against his collarbone, the tracery of Arthur’s gloved fingers teasing against his jaw, thumbing at his nipples, the stretch and slide and little shocks of pleasure when Arthur’s cock hit just the right spot. The temptation to speed things up was growing stronger with every minute, but Merlin held out as long as he could, drawing it out, letting it build and build until Arthur was gasping out ‘fuck, Merlin, _fuck_ ’ with every twist of his hips and Merlin was quite incapable of saying anything at all. They came within seconds of each other; Arthur collapsed against the back of the chair and Merlin kept riding him through the aftershocks until he was too wrecked to move. He nearly fell asleep like that, and would have, if the post-orgasm glow had not faded enough for him to notice his aching knees.

“Ugh, I’m not that old,” he groaned, staggering to his feet and going to grab tissues.

Arthur laughed. “We are, though. Look at us, we’re buying a house – ”

“Not necessarily a house!” Merlin interjected hastily.

“ – and getting married,” Arthur continued, ignoring him, “and maybe this is the wrong time to mention it, but I want a dog. We’re doing most of the big life steps all at once.” He stood up too, with more grace. “I’ve never understood what’s supposed to be so wrong with a picket fence. Obviously a moat would be better. But the general architectural concept is sound.”

Merlin flopped onto the bed. “You still want a castle, don’t you?”

“Don’t tell me you wouldn’t like a portcullis,” Arthur said, stretching out beside him. “And a drawbridge,” he added dreamily. “I’d love a drawbridge.”

“Whatever you say, Sleeping Beauty,” Merlin mumbled, his eyes drifting shut, “but I’m not fighting any dragons. Peaceful resolutions only. If you get a dog and a storybook castle and all that, I get to keep a dragon, that’s only fair.”

“Why do I want to marry you again?” Arthur groaned into his pillow, and Merlin fell asleep smiling.

* * *

He delivered the news to Freya in person, coming over to her flat after work on Monday and moving a cat so he could sit next to her on the sofa. “That’s wonderful, Merlin, I’m so happy for you!” she said, hugging him and looking tearful. “Try and _stop_ me witnessing. Will it be Hunith or Balinor who gives you away?”

That made Merlin frown. He had called his father on Sunday, crossing his fingers for good reception, and had got hold of him pretty quickly. Balinor was happy that Merlin was getting married. He was not happy that Merlin was marrying Uther Pendragon’s son, and had not actually used Arthur’s name once during their conversation, as if Arthur himself was some suspicious theoretical concept invented by Uther purely to lure Merlin in.

Merlin was relying on Hunith and with any luck, Gaius, to talk him around before the two families had to meet up. Balinor could be a human stormcloud when he was in a sufficiently dour mood, and that was without Kilgarrah stirring up trouble, as he was so fond of doing. Throw in Uther’s stony disapproval and it would be one hell of a party.

“You can always elope,” Freya suggested, when he explained. “Skip to the honeymoon.”

Damn. The honeymoon. No doubt Arthur had a shortlist of destinations already in mind, hopefully he’d clue Merlin in before they got to the packing stage. “The sooner we get married the better,” Merlin muttered. “I expect Uther will spend our engagement trying to get Arthur to dump me.”

“He has issues. Ignore him,” Freya said, sounding quite remarkably like Morgana. “What are my best man duties? Do you need any help getting things ready for the wedding?”

“Oh my God, yes. Arthur’s getting a start on the paperwork side of it today, but there’s the guest list to write and the venue to choose and, like, are we doing catering? I love Arthur, you know I do, but he likes expensive food and – well, I can’t afford to pay my share if he decides to go with caviar and a hundred bottles of champagne.” Merlin rubbed his face. “Luckily, he doesn’t like caviar. But you know what I mean.”

“Tell him that,” Freya advised, reaching up to pet the cat who was trying to climb onto her head. “Don’t expect him to guess, he won’t.”

“I’ll write it on the list,” Merlin decided. “He always comes back to the list.”

The talk with Will didn’t go quite as well. Merlin went straight on from Freya’s to the Serpent and Unicorn, where Will worked, hoping to catch him in a lull and talk over a pint. The lull was easy enough to come by, Anhora’s pub was not the kind of place that ever really bustled, and Will was happy to get them both drinks, but his face turned sour at the first mention of Arthur’s name.

“He’s a rich git,” he whined. “Are you actually going to marry him?”

“I am,” Merlin said firmly. “Are you going to be a grouch about it?”

“Is this thing going to be all pomp and ponce?”

“Don’t know. Doesn’t matter. Answer the question.”

“All _right_ ,” Will said, ungraciously. “Congratulations, Mer. He’d better make you happy. I’ll come along to make sure of it. Want another beer, on the house?”

“I have to get home and study,” Merlin said. “I’ll text you about the wedding soon.”

“You’re trying to study, move house and get married all at the same time?” Will whistled. “You’re a sucker for punishment, mate.”

“There’s a list,” Merlin told him. It was becoming a mantra. Trust in the list. _Believe_ in the list.

All the available fridge door space was taken up with Arthur’s house-hunting mood board, so the wedding plans were taped to a kitchen cabinet. The most important item – giving notice at the Registrar’s Office – had been taken care of, leaving only forty or so tasks left to tick off. When Merlin returned from securing his half of the bridal party (Arthur had asked Leon to be his other best man while at work, and had been answered with a massive bear hug in front of the mystified office staff), yet another list was lying on the kitchen counter with a pair of vaguely ominous highlighter pens.

“Guest list,” Arthur said, in tones that implied they were picking warriors to take into battle.

“Let’s keep it short,” Merlin said quickly, dumping his satchel and hurrying over to look.

“I agree. I mean, I’m not inviting Morgause, she freaks me out. I understand that forensic pathology is a very important job, but no one needs to talk about dead bodies quite that much. If there’s a zombie apocalypse someday I’m going to blame her for it. Honestly, I don’t want to invite most of Morgana’s side of the family, so keeping it small is the best excuse.” Arthur passed a blue highlighter over to Merlin and got up to fetch them each a glass of wine. “I’ve written down everyone I could think of who’ll expect an invitation. You mark off anyone you actively don’t want to be there, and add anyone I’ve forgotten.”

Merlin scanned the page. “You want Mordred to come? I thought you had a big falling-out with his girlfriend.”

“Well, yes,” Arthur admitted. “Kara’s pretty awful. But I like Mordred.”

“He’s creepy,” Merlin said, running blue across the name. “He has this _look_.”

“He doesn’t have a look!”

“Seriously, Arthur, he does, his eyes go all big and glassy like he’s trying to see inside your head. You’ve never noticed that?”

Arthur frowned at him. “No.”

Merlin sighed and kept reading down the list. “Do you really want your employer there?”

“It’s the polite thing to do.”

“Nope.” Merlin blued Annis’ name too. “This is our wedding, it is the one day we’re ever going to get that’s just about us, we decide who we want to be watching. If she’s there, you’ll be worrying about whether she’s judging our choice of cake or flowers or something.” He looked from one list to another with a rising sense of doom. “Fuck. We have to choose a cake. And flowers. We probably don’t need flowers?”

“Do you want Gwen to think we’re barbarians?”

Over the next hour and half, they worked their way through most of a bottle of wine, covered the paper in a cross-hatching of red and blue ink, and Merlin, at least, was regretting having any sort of social circle at all. “Stay calm,” Arthur said, squinting for any names that had _not_ been crossed out. “Morgana threatened to take off and become a hermit in the woods during the planning stages of her wedding, but obviously she didn’t. For one thing, Vivian would have tracked her down and given her hell, but also Morgana would never live somewhere without wifi.”

“Is that meant to reassure me?” Merlin said, from under his arms. “It’s hard to tell, with you.”

“Mm,” Arthur said, clearly not listening. He was still checking names. “Oh, come on, Agravaine is my uncle, don’t tell me you find him creepy too?”

“You _don’t_?”

In the end they thrashed out a guest list of about twenty people. Having seen just how big a Pendragon ceremony could be – Morgana and Vivian had had closer to two hundred of their collective nearest and dearest at _their_ wedding – Merlin was relieved, even if Agravaine and Uther were getting invited. Arthur was equally uncomfortable about Balinor and Taliesin. He had never met or spoken with either of them, but had picked up a generally unfriendly vibe despite Merlin’s attempts at diplomacy.

“Dad doesn’t have anything against you,” Merlin insisted. “He just has – mixed feelings about Uther. It’ll be fine! I told him the news on Sunday and he was pleased for us.” Editing out a conversation remarkably similar to the one Merlin had had with Will, only longer and growlier, that was more or less true. “So, are we emailing everyone tonight?”

“Emailing?” Arthur looked shocked. “These are _invitations_. I’ll show you what Morgana did.”

He disappeared into the bedroom and returned with a small sheet of heavy cream paper. It was stamped with two family crests and a request for the recipient’s company handwritten in stunning calligraphy. In verse. Quite good verse.

“Nope,” Merlin said. That was becoming a mantra too. “She had a year. She had a wedding planner. And let’s face it, she was marrying Vivian, who lives and breathes this stuff. I don’t, Arthur. I _read_ literature, I can’t write wedding invitations in free-form poetry.”

“Neither can I,” Arthur admitted. “But we don’t have a venue booked yet, there’s time to design something.”

Merlin looked despairingly at his laptop and books, set up on the coffee table for a study session that would keep him up the rest of the night if he didn’t start now. Arthur followed his gaze.

“I’ll look at venues,” he offered. “I’ll let you know when I’ve got a good one.”

It was nearly one in the morning before Merlin had the bones of his essay in good enough shape to close down his laptop. Usually by this point Arthur would have told him to come to bed at least twice, but he was on the other end of the sofa hunting down venues for a winter wedding, his coffee gone cold by his elbow. Merlin took one look at the screen, a dozen tabs forming a collage of chandeliers and glowing brides, and retreated to the bathroom to clean his teeth.

He came back to the sitting room when he heard Arthur make a peculiar noise, followed by the shout of Merlin’s name. “What is it?” he asked, expecting to be shown a golden ballroom or something else he would have to veto, but then he saw the look on Arthur’s face and tensed. “Arthur, what’s wrong?”

Arthur turned the laptop. “The Avalon Museum does weddings,” was all he said. Merlin looked at the website and saw what had made Arthur sound like that: _our new wing has been named in honour of the late Ygraine Pendragon, whose generous donations to the museum over the course of her lifetime have been continued by her husband, Lord Uther Pendragon. The Pendragon Room will be available to host weddings, corporate functions and…_ Merlin knelt down next to the sofa and put his arm around Arthur’s shoulders, feeling them tremble as Arthur pulled himself together.

“It opens officially next week,” he said. He took a breath. “When was he planning to tell me?”

Merlin just hugged him tighter. He didn’t know what to say.

* * *

It was hardly a decision, after that, where they would get married. As Ygraine Pendragon’s son, Arthur’s wedding couldn’t offer more perfect publicity and the museum was more than happy to accommodate him when he called the next morning, short notice disregarded. Arthur tried to call Uther next, three times in a row, with no success.

“Why is he like this?” he said, staring down at the phone sitting uselessly in his hand. “He’s always been like this.”

Merlin knew better than to say what he was really thinking – no matter how angry Arthur was right now, he wouldn’t want to hear a tirade against Uther the Appalling – so he just rubbed Arthur’s back and made him more coffee, cloudy-sweet with cream and sugar. Afterwards, on the bus ride to the library, he called Gwen to rant.

“Mum wouldn’t have liked that,” she said. “Ygraine didn’t go by Pendragon at work, you know, this is honouring Uther really. I lost touch with the Avalon Museum after my mum died, there’s painful memories all round. I can see why Uther didn’t mention it. Talking about all this with Arthur would be a difficult conversation and he tries to avoid having those.” She sighed. “Oh well, he’s going to get one now whether he likes it or not. Let me know how it goes? And while I’ve got you, we need to talk about rings.”

With Arthur planning the venue, the catering and the invitation design (Freya was helping him out on that one), plus probably at least six other things he wouldn’t think to tell Merlin about until it was too late to argue over them, Merlin had decided to handle the rings. He agreed to meet Gwen at lunchtime to look at different designs. Not being a jewellery person, he had not been in Excalibur Jewellery before. When he arrived, Gwen’s father Tom was busy with a client who wanted a very specific stone and was making rather a fuss about it. “It has to glow like _fire,_ ” the man said intensely, leaning across the counter. “I’ll make it worth your while.”

Tom looked harassed. Catching sight of Merlin, he said, “Just a moment!” and abandoned his scowling customer to duck into the back room. He returned a minute later with Gwen, who led Merlin around to a display case of rings.

“Do you have anything specific in mind already, or would you like to browse for a bit?” she asked, keeping an eye on the difficult customer’s back. He had just thumped on the counter to emphasise how unacceptable a topaz would be for his needs. “I want to make a _statement_ ,” he said.

“Do you want to go rescue your dad?” Merlin whispered. “Go ahead. I’ll browse.”

Gwen dealt with the customer, much more briskly than her father had, and Merlin browsed accordingly. He remembered contemplating this a few weeks after he’d met Arthur – feeling stupid at the time for taking the daydream so far, hah, the innocence of bygone days – but had not thought up until now about what he would want to have for himself.

“See anything you fancy?” Gwen asked, returning from her victory at the counter. “Don’t worry if nothing here quite suits what you have in mind, I can custom make a specific design once I know what you’re looking for.”

“Do wedding rings have to match?” Merlin asked. He was looking at a band of silver leaves. It was the sort of thing he could actually see himself wearing, but it was hardly Arthur’s style.

“The rings can be anything you like,” Gwen told him. “Don’t worry about rules. They’re all tradition and mostly nonsense anyway. Do you know what Lance and I did for our wedding? We got married in a friend’s barn. Everyone brought a plate, my dad baked a tower of cupcakes and my brother Elyan played guitar. It’s one of the happiest memories I have, and I didn’t need a wedding planner to make it happen. Just do what feels right. You and Arthur will be wearing the rings, they should look the way you want them to.” She glanced into the case. “You want the wreath?”

“I don’t know about Arthur, though.” What had he thought Arthur would like, all those months ago? Silver. Heavy. A simple design, nothing fussy. “There,” he said suddenly. It was perfect: a set of three plain bands, two of silver framing one of gold. The width and clear lines reminded Merlin somehow of armour. Arthur would love it. Gwen smiled her approval of his choice and opened the case to remove both rings; they clinked softly in her palm.

“How much is that?” Merlin asked, squinting at the price tags.

“Don’t be silly,” Gwen said. “It’s a wedding present.”

“Gwen! That’s too much, you can’t – ”

“Arthur is like family,” Gwen said decisively. “Which makes you family as well. I made both these rings, as it happens, I can decide if I want to give them away. And I do.”

Merlin tried to argue with her, and failed. He had not appreciated before now just how immoveable Gwen was once she made up her mind. She nestled each ring in a little red velvet box, put the boxes in a bag, and watched Merlin narrowly as he found a suitably secure position for the bag in his satchel. “Thank you,” he said helplessly. “They’re beautiful, Gwen.”

“I made Morgana’s rings too,” Gwen said with satisfaction. “Though she was much pickier.”

Merlin snorted. He believed it.

His workday ended at five on Tuesdays but he stayed at the library for another hour to study away from the distractions of weddings and family crises. He picked up groceries on the way home, threw a tray of vegetables in the oven (he was his mother’s son, after all, if in doubt reach for potatoes) and settled at the kitchen table to finish his essay while it cooked. Once the essay was sent off, he opened his satchel and took out the rings. They didn’t match at all, except to him, but had the same glint rolling together in his hand. He hoped he’d got the sizing right, because he didn’t plan on showing them to Arthur before the wedding. It would be a surprise. That in mind, he tucked the two boxes at the back of his sock drawer before Arthur got home.

Not that Arthur was thinking about the wedding – he had tried to reach his father a few times throughout the day and had got through eventually, only to be told that Uther didn’t have time to talk to him and would call back later, which he hadn’t. It had not put Arthur in a good mood. He kept checking his phone through dinner until Merlin swiped it off him.

“I didn’t even know he was still donating to the museum,” Arthur muttered, eyeing Merlin’s pocket like he was considering lunging across the table and getting his phone back. “Actually, I thought he hated the place. There’s an election coming up next year…I suppose it looks good, donating to the arts, and he hasn’t got any castles left to give.”

Just then the phone started ringing. Merlin reluctantly returned it. He finished eating while Arthur shouted in the next room and started washing dishes while Arthur paced around in angry silence, listening to whatever Uther was saying. Merlin amused himself inventing possible excuses, though Uther was not a man who usually bothered excusing himself.

“Not _relevant_ ,” Arthur exploded, after he’d hung up. “He said it wasn’t _relevant._ ”

Yep, excuses really were not Uther’s thing. “That was all he had?”

“He would have told me once it opened and it’s an empty gesture,” Arthur said in clipped tones that made it obvious he was quoting. “He doesn’t want us to get married at the museum. There’s nothing of her there, he said.”

“And?” Merlin prodded gently.

“I said we would anyway. So now he says he’ll pay for the service. Booking, catering…it’s how he apologises. He bought Morgana her Ferrari after the parentage thing came out.” Arthur paced around the kitchen, brooding on it. “My mother _was_ there, for a while anyway, she cared about the place. He’s wrong. Oh, and Merlin? We’re getting rid of the sofas. I’ve always hated them. I want something red.”

* * *

Slowly but surely, the lists got ticked.

They talked to caterers and tried food (and got into a loud fight in the car park over the gaia berry garnish, which Arthur liked but Merlin didn’t, because they were over-tired and irritable and ready to become hysterical over the smallest obstacle. They didn’t talk to each other for the rest of the night but made it up after eight hours of sleep. Gaia berries were taken off the menu).

They designed invitations (which Merlin did not care about but Freya did. She had a crafternoon at her flat with Arthur, during which he learned how to use a glue gun, she got him hooked on the new Regent Fisher television series and it turned out they loved the same pizza toppings, just not quite as much as her cats did).

They tried on tuxes (with Lance, Leon and Will trying on theirs at the same time, and Freya sitting in a corner taking photographs. The sales assistant came in to ask if they needed help, saw the be-suited line-up and lost his ability to use the English language in a coherent fashion. Freya gave him a kindly pat on the arm and guided him out of the room. Afterwards she went off to find a little black dress to match the tuxes; Arthur wandered into a hat shop and made Merlin try on a feathered monstrosity, which was apparently hilarious).

They agreed on a two week honeymoon to Cornwall in January with no argument at all, and Merlin asked Finna Wood, an old friend of Hunith’s, to be the celebrant. Morgana and Vivian, who had been checking in at intervals as if to test whether or not the pair of them were still sane without a wedding planner’s sure hand to guide them, seemed both impressed and a little disappointed that it was all going so smoothly. To a given value of smooth.

The house hunting was not going nearly so well, and that was mostly Merlin’s fault. For one thing, he had no time. He was either at work, on the phone about the wedding or buried in revision. When he could spare the time to look around the places on Arthur’s shortlist, he didn’t like any of them. It wasn’t that he didn’t _try_ to like them. But there were factors Arthur simply had not considered, like the fact Merlin wanted to have some hope of contributing to their mortgage. Also, there was too much glass. Most of these places appeared to have been designed without curtains in mind, and with professional cleaning services as a given. Merlin liked walls better. You could put books on them.

“There’s no time,” Arthur groaned, after another failed open house. “My lease expires in three weeks, we’re getting married in four, we may as well stay in Cornwall if we have nowhere lined up to come back to.” He made a brief wistful face. “Which would be a horrible commute, unless we ditch everything to take up fishing.”

They started packing anyway. What furniture Merlin had decided to keep when he moved out of his old flat was in storage; the worst case scenario was that everything else went into storage too until they found somewhere to put it all. Arthur sold his terrible sofas online and they made a pillow fort in front of the television, eating take-away while scrolling wearily through real-estate websites. A fortnight from when the lease would expire, Merlin had a crisis over the phone to his mother, who must have spoken to Gaius, because Merlin received a meticulously typed text the next day with directions to a place Gaius had heard about from a friend.

It was worth a look. Anywhere, Merlin felt, was worth a look at this point. He took a bus and hopped off at the end of the street, checking his directions to make sure it was the right one. Camelot Court was not far from the library but Merlin had never been down this way before. The tall town-houses were all built around a square with the statue of some obscure war hero on a horse in the middle. Merlin climbed the steps of No.1 to meet the real estate agent.

“You have to come over,” he told Arthur on the phone two hours later. “Tonight, if you can, the agent’s willing to wait. It hasn’t been on the market long, the previous owner had a bit of – um – legal trouble and has to sell up. The kind of legal trouble where you take a cocktail of illegal drugs and run around smashing other people’s garden gnomes while wearing some non-strategically placed feathers. Anyway, the house is fine, no damage. There’s even a garden. Come and look.”

Arthur came and looked. He ran a thoughtful finger over the wooden panelling in the hall, took in the bay window in the bedroom and the small walled garden outside, very carefully led Merlin away from the hopeful-looking real estate agent and hissed, “It’s _perfect._ We’re taking it, how the hell did you find it?” He sounded a little insulted that his efforts had gone to waste.

“Gaius found it.” Merlin bounced on the balls of his feet. “Really? We’re going to live here?”

Arthur wrapped an arm around his shoulders as they walked back to the agent. “Let’s find out.”

It took a few days of emailing negotiations back and forth to settle on a price, but Cornelius Sigan wanted to sell fast and the papers were signed within the week. Merlin wanted to start moving in the same day, but Arthur wouldn’t let him. “I’m having it cleaned,” he said firmly. “Just in case.”

Cleaning wasn’t all he had done, as Merlin found out when he went around after work. Where there had been a stretch of rather ugly wallpaper, there was now a set of built-in bookshelves, the clean woodsy smell filling up the room. “Gwen’s brother is in town for the wedding,” Arthur said, only a little bit smugly, coming into the room behind him with a pile of boxes. “Elyan’s a carpenter. He offered to do this as a wedding present.”

“I love Gwen’s whole family,” Merlin said, and tackled Arthur in a hug. “And I love you _best_.”

“Of course you do,” Arthur said breathlessly, before letting Merlin kiss him up against the nearest non-shelved wall.

They moved everything else in over the weekend, just before Merlin’s exams. Lance, Elena, Gwaine and Will dropped in at different points to help out and were all loaded up with boxes. Gwaine poked into everything with charmingly nosy questions and made unexpectedly superb spaghetti for lunch. Will kept trying to say sarcastic things to Lance, only to get a blinding sincerity that he didn’t know quite what to do with, and Elena tirelessly lugged in all the non-breakables while talking cheerfully about cricket to the equally tireless Arthur.

The crowning moment of the move happened when the new sofas arrived: wide, red and so, so comfortable. “Perfect,” Merlin sighed contentedly, sinking into the deep cushioning and propping his head on Arthur’s lap. All their worldly possessions were in boxes around them, and wasn’t it going to be fun finding space for them all, but that was a job for another day.

“Hey, Merlin.” Arthur waited until he opened his eyes, then crumpled up the house-hunting list and lobbed it into the open garbage bag on the floor, where it rolled in amongst all the plastic packaging. Merlin beamed up at him.

“Hey,” he said. “So where’s my dragon?”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not quite done with this series - at the moment I think there are two more stories left to go - but it's going on hiatus for a little while because the next part is a Christmas episode. In the meantime, you can find me at beyondthedreamline.tumblr.com where I, like Arthur, think too much about castles.


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